Bad Facts and Bad Acts: Housing Discrimination Continued

Recently we began exploring Richard Rothstein’s well documented story of housing discrimination as developed in The Color of Law: A Forgotten History

of  How Our Government Segregated America, one of three books we’ve recommended as essential to understanding America’s racial issues. We started with Rothstein’s basic premise – that housing discrimination in the United States, rather than being mostly the product of individual prejudices and private acts, actually resulted from long-enforced, deliberate policies developed, legislated, administered, and enforced by local, state, and federal government.  We complete the narrative by highlighting how state action set up today’s segregated, discriminatory housing regime.  Later, we’ll review Rothstein’s proposed solutions and examine the questions his ideas generate. 

Government – Private Agreements

Almost every first year law school real property course includes a segment on restrictive

covenants and two of the leading U.S. Supreme Court cases, Shelley v. Kraemer and Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co., which finally limited them.  Such covenants were contracts among white property owners in a neighborhood not to sell to  African-Americans.  Property owners who violated the covenants by selling to blacks faced lawsuits, either from other owners or from property owners associations, since membership in the associations was often a condition of purchase and the by-laws of the associations included the whites-only provisions.

Restrictive covenants depended on government because they required court

enforcement.  Even blacks who bought a house from a white seller might get evicted by court order after buying the property.  State supreme courts upheld the covenants.  To make matters worse, localities promoting housing sales often advertised the existence of restrictive covenants in neighborhoods, thereby entangling government in the policies that promoted and enforced segregated housing.

Federal Housing Administration Policy

As we saw earlier, the FHA helped assure segregated housing with lending policiespolicies that denied government loans to black home buyers just on the basis of race.  The FHA’s promotion of segregated housing, however, went far beyond its loan practices.  The FHA accepted the maxim that the presence of blacks in white neighborhoods diminished property values.  Homer Hoyt, the agency’s principal housing economist in the 1930s, wrote that, “where members of different races live together … racial mixtures tend to have a depressing effect on land values.”

The FHA, in fact, encouraged white flight from neighborhoods into which African Americans found a way to move.  The FHA’s presumption of diminished property values helped support private actions of real estate agents in such practices as blockbusting, a scheme in which agents sold or rented a house to a black family in a border-line black-white area at an above market price then convinced white property owners in the area to sell out of fear the neighborhood was turning black.  The agents then bought homes from panicked white owners at below market values and sold them at high prices to blacks.

Freeway Construction

The 1940s, 50s, and 60s saw the beginning of America’s highway construction boom, including development of the Interstate Highway System.  

Freeways weren’t just built in wide open spaces, connecting major cities like Dallas and Oklahoma City.  Freeways went through cities, often meaning massive construction projects within them.  That displaced urban residents.  Rothstein demonstrates that the burden of displacements fell disproportionately on African American neighborhoods.  Governmental units overseeing highway construction, however, made little or no provision for relocating displaced residents.  With legal restrictions preventing African Americans from moving into areas occupied by whites, more and more blacks were forced into smaller spaces in the African American community, likely producing more and more ghettos.   

  

State Sanctioned Violence

Despite all the efforts government and private actors, with government support, made to keep African Americans out of white areas, sometimes they got in. Segregation’s advocates possessed another tool that limited black access to integrated housing – old fashioned violence.  The government played a major role in this as well.  

When a black family moved into a previously all-white neighborhood, rock-throwing, bombings, beatings, and other violent acts sometimes followed.  While private individuals carried out these acts, they often enjoyed immunity from police action or prosecution.  Law enforcement turned a blind eye to the violence and some black families left their new homes rather than face continued assault without police protection. Rothstein devotes a full chapter to this topic and the horror stories are just that – horrible.

Rothstein describes other policies and practices that contributed to a problem that very

much remains today.  He covers regulations and actions by the Internal Revenue Service, such as, until 1970, granting tax exemptions to private, whites-only academies established in the South to evade desegregation, tactics of school districts in locating schools in ways that discouraged or impeded integration, and the impact of income suppression through government action.  All these factors illustrate his basic point that private prejudice would never have had the impact it did without the active, intentional involvement of government at all levels.

Next, we’ll get to Rothstein’s solutions.      He covers HH